The Orange Grove: 'Dues' instead of 'taxes' still extortion

In the April 15 New York Times, author and opinion writer Richard Conniff suggests in "Abolish All 'Taxes'" that what the government collects from us each year be called "dues" instead of "taxes." As he puts it, "We need language to remind us that this is our government, and that we thrive because of the schools and transit systems and 10,000 other services that exist only because we have joined together."

Nice try, but it won't fly. First, many of those services would easily exist, and, in fact, do, without government. But, unlike with government's "services," they aren't paid for by means of extortion. You know about extortion, at least from the movies, no? It is when someone promises you that unless you pay him or his organization a certain sum, you will be killed or maimed or your property will be burned down. And this is what Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called "the price of civilization."

Second, government tends to establish monopolies, so one reason it is difficult to get its "services" elsewhere is that it makes sure no one can provide them. Take first-class mail! Only the U.S. Postal Service may provide it. Or passports.

Third, when you pay dues to, say, Costco, Sam's Club or the gym, you always have the option to exit - that is, to stop going and paying. There may be some provision that you need to fulfill but only because you agreed to do so in the first place.

Taxes must be paid with no consent involved and with no exit option. When someone is born into a country, and unless they stop being citizens and leave, they must pay taxes. In fact, you must pay a country's taxes even if you're merely visiting there to do some business.

Fourth, consider how taxes came to be in the first place. The ruler of the realm - king, tsar, Caesar, whoever - imposed levies on those under his or her command for the privilege of living and working in what that ruler owned, namely, the country. "You live and work here, so you pay me!"

That was how it worked under the widely held but mistaken belief that the powerful who conquer a place are its rightful owners. But what the American Revolution was about is the abolition of this ridiculous myth that the government owns the country. Instead, the owners are private citizens - they have the right to private property (as it is clearly implied in the U.S. Constitution). Government, in turn, is supposed to protect this right of the citizenry, among some others. Government is like a hired bodyguard, not a ruler, at least not in a free country.

When monarchies were the political norm, which is still the case in many places around the globe, ordinary people ("subjects") lived by permission of the government. They had no right to their lives, liberty, pursuit of happiness, property or freedom of speech. Serfdom was widespread, meaning people were legally tied to the lands where they lived - they belonged to the ruler.

Renaming taxes "dues" isn't going to change their nature as a form of legalized extortion. Mr. Conniff should know that a rose by any other name is still a rose, and taxes by whatever euphemistic label attached to them would still be taxes, the expropriation of resources by the rulers of the realm.

By what other means could the few legitimate services of government be paid for? By the voluntary system of contract fees. All contracts, which are backed by law, would have a fee attached. But no one would be forced to get this backing, though it would be unwise not to do it. So there could be plenty of funding for the strictly limited government that a free society should have. That's not, of course, the bloated leviathan that we now have, one that has departed from the American founders' idea that governments are instituted to protect our rights.

What renaming taxes as "dues" would accomplish is to prolong the time it will take to finally abolish this brutal feudal device from what is supposed to be a free country. The price of civilization, my foot.

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